


Bleach

by tectoniche



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Almost Entirely Bitter, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bittersweet, Everyone Has Issues, Everyone is Dead, Heavy Angst, M/M, POV Second Person, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-15
Updated: 2015-07-15
Packaged: 2018-04-09 12:21:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4348579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tectoniche/pseuds/tectoniche
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bad situation. Worse way to cope.</p><p>Alternatively: Eren and Levi could be considered lovers, but the love in the both of them had left a long time ago.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bleach

**Author's Note:**

> I'm supposed to be working on I Met You Online right now, but I needed an angst fill. I usually have a drabble-esque short that I write before I actually write something to post, which is what this used to be but I didn't stop writing at the allotted 400 words.  
> I really like this. Probably one of my all-time favorite things that I've written TBH  
> Unbeta'd! I did read through it more than I usually do, though, so probably not bad.

When you found him, his breathing was loud and pained. He sounded close to retching; gulping at the air he apparently couldn’t get enough of. His eyes were bloodshot, the pretty gray and blue colors mottled with an incriminating shade of red. He was on his hands and knees; his body being racked with tremors every sixty, forty-five, thirty, fifteen, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five seconds.

You stopped a few feet from him, contemplating your current situation. Did you really want to get further involved in the mess that was this man? This man, whom you had idolized for so long, only to have your views pulverized? This man, once your hero, now your impromptu closest friend. But did you actually want to know what was wrong with him, when it came down to it? His stoic facade broken, what deeply-wrought wounds still ailed him, that you didn't already know of? You closed the gap.

The bleach was next to him, the cap twisted off and the bottle toppled. It spilled across the floor, inching closer and closer to the man before you. His hands were red, an angry red, from scrubbing listlessly at the floor. You outstretched your hand, prepared to act, but you paused. This was the last chance you had to turn back, did you really want to get involved? You place your hand on the small of his back.

He flinches, a full body affair that has you wincing yourself. His eyes have gone wide, staring pointedly at your bare feet. It’s the middle of the night, and you wouldn’t usually walk around with no shoes, but you hadn’t thought about it. Based on his expression, you can only assume that he was too wrapped up in his own little- unbearable- world to have heard you come in. His breathing starts to quiet, although he is still panting. The tremors have stopped, but he minutely shakes without stop.

You move your hand up to his shoulder, not picking it up. It drags slowly along his back, and you secretly still marvel at the fact that you can touch him in this moment. In this moment of utter vulnerability of the one who shows no weakness, and here you are. He turns his head to you, a slow and punctuated movement. His face contorts, probably in attempt to glare at you, but the effect is lost. He sighs; it’s a resigned sound, the type you’d peg on an injured animal, lost of hope.

Your other hand finds it’s place on his left shoulder, and you slowly move your hands under his arms. You pull him up, until he’s standing at full height in front of you. ‘Standing’ is generous, because without your support he would’ve crumpled to the ground by now. Or never had gotten up in the first place.

He stares at you, his eyes hazy and unfocused, occasionally darting to your upper body or just to the left of your face. The eye contact between you is strained. It always is. Heavy with unresolved tension and questions left unasked.

Slowly he snakes his arms around you, and clasps them around the back of your waist. He lowers his gaze, and leans slightly forward until he’s against your chest. Both of you stand unmoving, probably waiting for the other to move away first. He doesn’t. You don’t.

“You should really be in bed right now,” he says. You’re annoyed by the remark, because Lord knows who really needs to go to bed here.

“So should you. Why are you even out here?”

“I don’t know.”

You hadn’t even been expecting a response, let alone one so personal. Most people wouldn’t accept it as a valid answer, and others would use it as a substandard excuse, but coming from him of all people… it meant something. Something that you didn’t understand and didn’t want to find out. You didn’t know how he couldn’t know what he was doing, but you didn’t doubt it.

It takes a special kind of person to just _get_  this man, and all those people are dead.

Eventually you pick him up, to which he doesn’t object. He just wraps his legs around your waist, and loops his arms around your neck. At any other moment he would fuss about it, seeing as he isn’t a child. He’s small, and quiet like a child though, when he wants to be. He’s damaged. So are you.

It takes a lot out of someone to do the things the pair of you do. When you were younger, you didn’t understand why he was all stone-cold and hard around the edges. Even amidst comforting sobbing comrades, he never shed a tear, or even made a face more emotional than a grimace. You didn’t understand why you occasionally walked into his room to find him crying, silently, but the next day you both pretended it never happened. You didn’t understand how somebody could allegedly be so in control and then just… lose it. You didn’t understand, then, that over time each and every death wears away at you, like water against a shoreline. It cuts deeper and deeper without fail, eventually pushing you over the brink and you snap. And like a broken coil, at the end of it you can’t spring back to where you used to be. By the time you’d met him, he’d passed the brink. You had too, now. So you understood.

You carried the man back to his room, and set him on the bed. He made no move to get comfortable, just watched you. His eyes were softer than usual without the squint that accompanied his glare. His lips were not sneering as they often did, but sat flat and emotionlessly. Like this, he was cute. It was a horrid thing to think, but you’d admitted that to yourself a long time ago and stopped caring. You knew that your relationship was never going anywhere romantic; you knew it wasn’t and he knew it too. You could consider yourselves lovers, but the love inside the both of you had left long ago.

He dropped his gaze again, and rolled on his side. He was still facing you, but he didn’t look at you anymore even though his eyes were still open. You sat down on the floor, and you were the right height so that if you laid your head back it could rest fairly comfortably on the bed. He stuck out his hand and you held it.

You stare at the ceiling. He stares at the wall. You don’t think this is how lovers are supposed to act.

It’d be about two hours later before either of you move anything heavier than an eyelid. He’d been this sleepless as long as you’d known him, but you’d only recently achieved it as well. Reduced to only two or three hours of sleep for every twenty or more hours awake, you had been tired for a while before the routine had set in. You weren’t exactly tired by lack of sleep, anymore, and if anything you were tired of everything. You were tired of your broken life, and everything in it. A permanent fatigue set in, and you lived with it just like you lived with everything else.

He rolled to the other side of the bed, and wrapped his arms around his stomach. This was your queue to move as well. You slept in his bed, sometimes, and he slept in yours, but that’s all it was. Sleeping. It was a necessity neither of you were willing to give up.

That’s not to say you’d never gotten more intimate, because you had, once. You had went all the way together, but you had both cried after for reasons not intended. That was the first and last time you’d seen him start to cry with someone else in the room. The day after you wished that maybe someone would’ve teased you about it, like they might’ve had it happened a few years earlier. Too much had changed, and you knew it, but that didn’t stop you from yearning for the way things used to be.

You stood up, and looked at the man in the bed. His eyes were open, staring relentlessly at the opposite wall. He probably wouldn’t fall asleep for a while now, and you wouldn’t either. You knew that tomorrow, everything would be the same as it always was. That’s just how the two of you were. With that thought, and a thousand apologies on the tip of your tongue, you opened the door and left. Levi was just being Levi, and you were just being Eren, so you knew what this experience meant. He knew it, too.

 

Nothing.

 

 


End file.
